Leaving Lucy Pear

by Anna Solomon

  “The strike,” he prompted.

  “The strike,” she repeated.

  She took his hand. “I forgive you, Joe. It’s all done.” Then they read the paper together, in silence.

  At Sven’s, Emma poured coffee and listened to the men talk. She liked the job Josiah had gotten her there, liked how in the afternoons light poured in the front of the shop and neglected the back so that the place seemed to be two places, and how she knew by now, after only a couple weeks, which men sat in the sun and which in the dark, and how well their choices fit their faces. She liked not being in the house with Roland. But today the air in the shop felt too close. The men looked sick with disappointment. They spoke softly, as if a baby were sleeping nearby, and Emma found herself thinking of her own babies: of the ones who, like her, had been pale, almost translucent; and of Lucy. At the back of Lucy’s neck, and on the backsides of her ears, and along the tops of her toes, there grew a black, downy fur that Emma touched helplessly, incessantly, as she nursed her. She had nursed all her babies well but often without thinking of it—she had mended clothes and stirred porridge and fed the fire and shoveled snow with babies attached to her breasts. With Lucy, she was transfixed. Even now, if Lucy was in sight, Emma watched her. She had watched her new skittishness sharpen in recent days. Lucy looked at Emma like a rabbit, ready to bolt. Thinking of her now as she poured coffee for the grieving men, Emma felt a nauseating fear rip through her. Lucy! What was wrong with Lucy? She spilled the coffee, enough to drip off the counter and stain her shoes, but the men, eyes on their mugs, barely noticed.

  In Charleston, Admiral Seagrave believed the execution unjust but had no one to talk about it with—not the other officers, who would disagree, nor his wife, who didn’t like “the world” disrupting family time. He tried his older son, but the six-year-old said, “Those wops? Jack Jessup says they got ’em good!” And all Seagrave could think to do was send him to his room and wonder—as he often did now—about the daughter he would never know.

  On Eastern Point, Bea interrupted Ira and Henry to ask, “Did you see the two-inch about Mother Jones?” Her voice was rough from not speaking. “She’s ninety-eight years old, in the hospital, and nobody will tell her they’re dead. They’re telling her they’ve been given an indefinite reprieve. She’s lying there shouting things like, ‘They’ll never dare to kill them, it would stir up the whole world!’ And nobody will tell her the truth. They say it would kill her, but I don’t buy that. The same article says she lost her husband and four children in one week to yellow fever. If that didn’t kill her . . . I think they’re just scared.”

  “Of what, sweetheart?” Henry leaned forward, preparing to stand. He felt buoyed, more like his usual self, his boss self. Bea had not said so much in days. But when she looked at him, her cheeks wrinkled and red from where her sleeves had pressed into them, her eyes pinned him to his chair. “That she knows something they don’t,” she said, in a tone bordering on disgust, as if he had asked her the color of the sky. Then she left the room, leaving him alone with his brother and their papers, every inch of which they had already read.

  Twenty-nine

  Once upon a time, Caleb Stanton himself handed the quarrymen their pay, and now, as a symbol of his mistrust and a warning to his son-in-law, he began the practice again. On the first Friday after the execution, the last whistle sounded and there he was, all five feet two inches of him, standing straight as a mast in his white suit and white Panama hat against the backdrop of the Berenice, the hulking, shining, incomparably aggressive 0-4-0 tank-type locomotive named after his late wife.

  Caleb always told any man who asked—and more asked than you might expect, which confused one of Caleb’s basic divisions of the world, into the sorts of people who wondered about things and the people who didn’t—that Berenice was an old lover of his. This seemed to amuse them. Maybe it even made them like him a little more. At least it used to. But that had been before the strike. Before the Mendosa. Before, now that he thought of it, the Scare. It had been years since Caleb stood before his men.

  They lined up according to how long it took them to get to the Berenice from their positions: Berenice’s engineer, her brakeman, the boys who work the chains and pull the pin, the loaders, the draftsmen, the carvers, the cutters, the surfacers, the derrick operators, the fall men, the drillers, the chip men, the men who set the powder kegs and lit the match. Every one of them colored gray. “Asa Hood,” Caleb said, prompted by Sam Turpa, who stood to his right and knew the faces. “Jacob Soltti, Urjo Matson, Dominic Toneatti, Henry Hanka, Andrew Pearson.” Caleb knew how to pronounce these sorts of names—he had hired a tutor, years ago, to teach him. This had seemed to him a good idea. But as he looked down the line at the gray faces, Greeks, Finns, Swedes, Italians, Yankees, Irish, and called out the syllables that had taken not a small amount of effort to learn to pronounce, an effort he had thought of as wholly selfless—“Peter Lilja, Angelo Buzzi, Toivo Nikola”—as he waited for Sam Turpa to hand him each check, which Caleb then deposited into a gray hand, he felt a steam rising off the line, a thickening agitation, as if their strike had brought them no satisfaction at all, as if in their impeccably pronounced names they heard Caleb joking with the other quarry bosses: One left-handed Finn is worth three right-handed Yanks. Pay the Irish, watch them drown. As the line steamed, Caleb felt physically vulnerable for the first time in his life, and bewildered. Why were his men so angry? He paid them fairly and on time, let them have their little union meetings, never asked them to sign any yellow-dog contracts. He was not the tyrant his grandfather had been. Why should they fight to save a couple of anarchists? If it weren’t for the state, who would have stamped their papers when they arrived in America? Who would pay for the streets that took them from home to work? “Silas Procter, Octave Marcelles, Liam Murphy, Jeffrey Murphy, Johnny Murphy . . .”

  Caleb paused. The Murphy boys didn’t look at him, but that’s not what made him stop—most of the men didn’t look at him. It was something else, a fleeting doubt that made him think of Berenice. She had been so small, like a child, so finely jointed at her wrists and knees, so tiny at her waist you could hook an arm round her and reach the same hand into your own pocket. Even Caleb could manage this. It was the pose of a carefree man, an adventurer.

  Maybe it was his longing for his bride that made him turn to watch the Murphy boys depart. Maybe it was the steaming line, his exhaustion, his feeling that the men might rise up at any moment, light torches, run shrieking through the sheds. Generally, as a boss, Caleb did not abide doubt—in another era he would have gone on to the next man without hesitating. But he hesitated, and turned, and saw what he must somehow have sensed: that Johnny Murphy’s cap was bulging in the back, and that there, just above her collar, one dark curl had escaped.

  • • •

  Emma’s first thought was that the car sounded almost but not quite like the Duesenberg. Her second, seeing the small man she recognized as Caleb Stanton jump from a Rolls-Royce in her yard, was that the boys had been involved in some way with the strike. Watching Liam and Jeffrey climb out of the car, she felt a seam of pride, thinking of her father nailing up his Land League posters along the main road in Banagher.

  She wasn’t expecting another boy to follow them, and she didn’t understand, at first, why the boy’s hair was so long, or why someone else’s child had been brought to her, until it struck her that Lucy Pear wasn’t standing with Janie and the others, who had come out of the perry shack to watch. Emma had arrived home from Sven’s half an hour ago—she hadn’t checked on the children yet.

  Mr. Stanton pushed Lucy toward the house. “The quarry’s not a place for a girl,” he said as he deposited her in Emma’s arms. His voice was gentler than Emma would have guessed, nothing like his cold blue eyes.

  “Emma?” Roland called.

  “Everything’s fine!” she called back.

  “Her father should know,” said
Mr. Stanton, striding for the door, but Roland was already there, on his one leg, the first Emma had seen of him in sunlight in the month since he’d come home. His beard, she saw, had grown to be wider than his ears. Bits of crumbs stuck to his shirt. He was out of breath from hopping. “What’s going on?” he asked, but no one answered. He stared at Lucy in her costume. “Get inside!” he shouted. “Get your arse inside this house!”

  It was shameful, how glad Emma was that Roland could not climb down from the step. She said, “I’ll bring her in, Rolly. Go sit.”

  “What the fuck’s been going on?”

  “Rolly! Boys, help your father get back to his chair.”

  “I don’t need help getting anywhere,” sneered Roland. He would not move from the doorway, Emma saw, and no one could move him—even on one leg, he was like a mountain.

  Mr. Stanton said, “Mr. Murphy, if I may . . .”

  “You may not,” Roland mocked back.

  “Thank you,” Emma said to Mr. Stanton. “Thank you for bringing them home. We’ll manage from here.”

  Mr. Stanton took off his hat. His eyes were wet, Emma saw. “It’s not such a crime,” he said, “a girl wanting . . .” Then he trailed off, got into his car without looking again at Roland, and drove back down the hill.

  “Was there leather on the seats in there?” asked Joshua.

  Liam and Jeffrey nodded, but their eyes were on their father, who stared at Lucy as if repulsed.

  “Is like a galloping sofa!” Joshua cried.

  “Here,” Emma said, taking pennies from her pocket and giving one to each child. “Go down to the store, buy a piece of candy.” She led Lucy into the perry shack, where she sat her down on the potato bin, sat herself down on the “turnip bin,” and took Lucy’s hands into her own. It was a way of comforting the girl and steadying herself. Emma was frightened by Roland, in the doorway. And she didn’t know what to make of Lucy in her brothers’ clothes, an old cap in her grip (and now in Emma’s), her curls in a plantlike tangle around her head. Emma felt closer to understanding something about Lucy’s behavior all summer—her itchy glances, her pleas for Emma to go back to work—but also farther, because why? Why would the girl want to do such a thing?

  Before Emma could speak, Lucy started to cry. She shook silently, then let out a soft wail, her mouth opening to a raw, shocking size, her fingers pulling away from Emma’s. The cap dropped to the floor as she hid her face in her hands. Emma leaned forward, taking the girl into her arms. “It’s all right,” she said. “Shhh. You don’t have to explain.”

  This was true, she realized—she didn’t need to know, if it meant having Lucy back, the way she’d been. But Lucy was already explaining, through her tears: “I wanted the money . . . I thought the pears . . . but then I . . . This year . . . I just wanted . . .”

  Emma put the snotty, broken parts together. The pears. Lucy was falling apart over the pears, the change of plans since the Mendosa, the neglected Schedule of Ripeness pinned to the shack wall. The children played jacks in the perry shack now, or marbles—they passed time here to avoid Roland. The fruit they had harvested was nearly pressed and there would be no more—despite Roland’s urging, they had been too rattled by the Feds to go out again. But not Lucy, Lucy was saying. Lucy was not afraid of those men! Lucy wanted to finish what they had started. They had made a plan and they should stick to it!

  Her vehemence startled Emma. How had she come to care so much about the pears? She took Lucy gently by the shoulders and began, “Sweet girl, we’re going to be fine, it’ll all be fine, you don’t have to go dressing . . .” She wanted to tell her the money from Sven’s was enough, tell her part of growing up was accepting what you couldn’t change, but Lucy pushed her hands away. “It is not fine!” she shouted, and started to sob.

  Emma waited then, until Lucy began to tell her, between choking gulps of air, not about the pears or the quarry but about a trip she had taken a few weeks ago, late at night, while the rest of the family slept. She described a ride in a truck full of whiskey, her near capture, a man’s foot on her back, heavier than her carry bag at the quarry, his foot bruising her ribs. There was some kind of search, lights beaming through the coat that covered her, the man’s foot pressing harder, a deal struck, her nose smashed against the truck floor. Emma hardly breathed as Lucy spoke. Apparently it wasn’t just the job: Lucy had a whole life, a species of courage, Emma knew nothing about. You found a newborn and she seemed blanker, somehow, than the newborns you had birthed, free of any history, exempted from her own ties, more yours. But of course she wasn’t any more yours than they were, which was to say less and less all the time.

  Still, Emma did not understand where the story was heading, not until Lucy described climbing out of the truck at the Eastern Point Yacht Club. Even then, Emma could not believe it. How could she? She was late, as usual, with laundry. She had not yet found the torn newsprint with Beatrice Cohn’s likeness in the pocket of Liam’s pants. But then Lucy told her about slipping through the gap in the honeysuckle, walking up through the pear trees, swinging a leg onto the terrace of the house where she had been born.

  She looked at Emma and said, with sudden coherence: “I saw my mother.”

  “Lucy . . .” Emma started to say, but Lucy went on, not noticing or caring about Emma’s astonished tears.

  “She looks just like me! Anyone could see it! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I—”

  “What were you doing working for her?”

  “I—”

  “How could you not have told me she was right there all this time?”

  “Lucy—”

  “You take me from her, then you go back and don’t even tell me?”

  “I didn’t take you.”

  “You did!”

  “She left you.”

  Lucy glared at Emma. Her breath was ragged from crying, her hair wild, poor Lucy with her wild hair Emma had no idea how to care for.

  “Where did she leave me?” Lucy asked quietly. She had started to shiver.

  “In the orchard.”

  “Where?”

  “Under a tree.”

  “Which tree?”

  “The middle one.”

  Lucy shivered harder now. Emma reached for her hands, and when Lucy didn’t pull away, she blew onto them. She rubbed the girl’s arms, but nothing helped. She wasn’t cold, she was inconsolable, she was weeping without tears. “Wait here, don’t go anywhere,” Emma said, and ducked out of the shack. She had forgotten Roland, filling the doorway of the house.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  “What’s going on in there?” he asked.

  “Later,” she said. She tried to squeeze past him, but he tilted on his leg, blocking her way.

  “Now,” he said.

  “She found Mrs. Cohn,” Emma said quietly. She was so determined to get inside she only noticed the fact of Roland giving way. She didn’t see the rise and fall of his Adam’s apple, or the color leaving his face. On her way back out, she nearly tripped on him—he had lowered himself to sit on the threshold—but she ran on toward the shack, afraid Lucy would be gone.

  She was there, still shaking. Emma, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders, said, “This is what you were bundled in. When Peter found you.”

  Lucy looked at the blanket.

  “It’s yours,” Emma said.

  “Peter?”

  “Yes.”

  Lucy nodded. She appeared to be thinking hard. The chatter of her teeth slowed. “What is she like?” she asked.

  Emma didn’t understand at first. The question was almost bewilderingly obvious. It was so simple, and yet impossible to answer. What was Beatrice Cohn like? She wanted to be kind, for Lucy’s sake, but not overly kind, for her own. She wanted to be truthful, but Beatrice Cohn did not hold still in the mind. She was sensitive, selfish, f
earful, overconfident; she was a Jew; she was homely, lovely, ancient, immature; her kindness was helplessly aggressive; she was lonely. “Lonely” would be the word, if one was forced to sum her up. But that did no one any good.

  Finally, Emma said, “She means well.”

  She would not forget how Lucy’s face sagged with disappointment then. Instantly, Emma regretted the paltriness of her answer. It had been so ungenerous! So sterile and meticulous as to be a lie. Yet Emma could not think how to say anything else. Lucy’s curiosity, however natural, was painful to behold. Emma felt as if a scaffold were buckling inside her.

  “I almost died walking home, you know.” Lucy’s tone was heartbreaking in its matter-of-factness. “I thought I was going to die. And then by the time I got here the sun was rising and you hadn’t even noticed I was gone. You were asleep!” She lowered her voice. “I noticed every time you left in that car.”

  Emma’s face grew hot. She filled with rage—how dare Lucy?—swept quickly under by shame: instinctively, she glanced toward the house. But Lucy had been quiet, careful, protective of Emma even as she confronted her, and Emma recognized the more essential crime of her affair: each time she had disappeared in Story’s Duesenberg, she had left Lucy lying awake and alone in the night.

  Her throat burned. “O Lord. I am sorry.”

  “Will you take me back?”

  Emma felt relief bloom inside her. She thought Lucy meant one thing, until she saw that the girl’s eyes were bright with tears. Determined to hide her disappointment, Emma held her gaze. “We’ll see,” she said. It was a thing she said often to her children, a seemingly innocent way to put off their requests, but she heard now the trickery in it, for it implied a helplessness on her part. It belied—and therefore strengthened—her power over them.

  “Please,” said Lucy, who rarely begged for anything, but Emma was too full of feeling to think, too overcome to promise anything. She didn’t want to promise anything. “We’ll see,” she said again. Then she went to help Roland up from the stoop.